Digital archives are central information repositories often used by large corporations for storing or backing-up critical business documents for extended periods. Because these archived digital documents support essential business operations, it is imperative that their content be accurately maintained. Conventional schemes attempt to protect against corruption of data by performing a data integrity check at the point where data is received by the archive system. For instance, when a data file is transferred to the archive system, a cyclic redundancy check (“CRC”) may be performed to ensure that the file was received by the archive system successfully.
However, errors may occur in the archive system at many other places in the archive system besides at the input interface, and not all errors are data transfer errors. While a CRC may provide information about one type of error occurring at one point in the archive system, it provides little or no information about non-file transfer errors, errors located at different points in the archive system, or why errors occur. For instance, an error may not have occurred at an input interface, but may have occurred while storing the file to a storage medium. Further, a CRC may detect an error that occurs at an input interface, but does not detect what may be the cause of the error. Additionally, a CRC fails to detect non-file transfer errors, such as an error that may occur when a document scheduled for destruction fails to be destroyed.
Because data integrity is of utmost importance in an archive system, a need exists in the art for a comprehensive solution that ensures the integrity of all processes performed by an archive system.